Demokratische Netzpolitik - (k)ein Platz für Agenten
Auch kein Freund von Agenten: Der Informatiker Jaron Lanier.
Agents of Alienation
Auszüge zu Privatsphäre und Sicherheitsstandards aus einem Interview mit P. Maes:
JB: On a Utopian level you're talking about designing agents at MIT Media Lab as pure research. That's a very different situation than the real world where these technologies are going to be implemented by corporations that are interested in selling things. Unless you configure your own agent, or you retain a service where the agent is strictly controlled by you, the computer user is going to be served by an agent of a search engine company or a bookselling company or a catalog company, etc. Once such corporations find out you want x or y or z, you begin to lose what remains of your privacy, then you lose your identity by becoming an economic cipher to the new band of info-transactional conglomerates.
PM: ... in fact there is already a standard that has been proposed to the W-3 consortium, the OPS standard - open profiling standards - which has been proposed by Firefly and Netscape, and then afterwards Microsoft joined as well. That standard specifies how personal information about a user could be stored in the browser, and it also specifies that information would be the property of the user, and that the user will be able to specify that every time a site asks for certain information for example, the user will specify which information can be given to that site and what can be given to that site. This is similar to cookies, but cookies done in the right way. The difference between cookies and the OPS standard is that you will know what the site is asking for. ...
Privacy is one of the primary problems we have to get right if we want agent technology to be widely adopted, and so we've been very concerned with this ...
Agenten verändern den E-Commerce:
Studien des MIT und von IBM kommen zu dem Ergebnis, daß Agenten zum Chaos im e-commerce führen können.